OFH Throwback- Episode #14- Did Gods Colonize the Pacific?

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Hello, and welcome to this throwback episode of Our Fake History.

This week, I'm throwing you back to season one and episode 14, Did Gods Colonize the Pacific?

A few months ago on the 200th episode of this podcast, I had listeners call in and ask me questions.

Someone asked me what part of the world that I'd covered on our fake history would I want to travel to.

Now, at the time, I said Japan,

but upon further reflection, I think I should have said the Polynesian islands.

Really, any Polynesian island.

I haven't done much traveling in the Pacific at all, and I hear those islands are quite nice.

But perhaps more importantly, over the course of researching this podcast, I've become particularly fascinated with the history and culture of Polynesian people.

One of the series I'm most proud of is a two-part series I did a few seasons back on the history of Rapanui, also known as Easter Island.

I would love to visit Rapanui and take in the famous Moai.

As someone that's had a lifelong fascination with boats and sailing, I can't help but be amazed by the massive oceanic voyages undertaken by the Polynesians.

The peopling of the Pacific still kind of blows my mind, especially when you consider how early in human history it took place.

But the immensity of this feat has led to all sorts of historical myths about how people got to these far-flung islands on the Pacific.

Episode 14 was the first time that I dip my toe into some of this fake history about the peopling of the Pacific.

Central to this episode is the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl.

Now, listening back to this episode, I think you can hear in my style of presentation how much affection I have for Thor Heyerdahl.

There's something about his audacious style, his sense of adventure, his willingness to take risks that I can't help but be charmed by.

But to be clear, Thor Heyerdahl's theories were completely wrong.

Some have even accused them of being racist.

Heyerdahl would go on to create a theory that a light-skinned super-civilization originating somewhere in Turkey spread throughout North Africa, made its way to South America, and then proceeded to colonize the Pacific.

This hypothesis has been roundly debunked and is now largely considered pseudo-scientific and pseudo-historical.

When you go back and look at Heyerdahl's writings, one can't help but notice a bias against Polynesian people.

He had a hard time believing that the ancestors of the people currently living on the Pacific Islands could have created their monumental sculptures or undertaken massive oceanic voyages.

Let me be clear, he was very wrong about this.

So, as much as I may have some affection for Heyerdahl's stunts, I don't want to let him off the hook for his bad ideas.

Also, since this episode came out nine years ago, I have learned more about the Polynesian style of voyaging.

The episode you're about to hear is largely built around the puzzle of the Humboldt Current.

As you might remember, the Humboldt Current is a strong Pacific Ocean current that flows from the coast of Peru west across the Pacific.

Now, if you just put a raft on the Humboldt Current, you will eventually be taken to the main body of Polynesian islands.

As you'll hear in the episode, this was one of the main reasons that Thor Heyerdahl thought that the islands were colonized from east to west, with the colonists originally coming from South America.

Now, when I made this episode nine years ago, I accepted that all the good evidence suggested that the colonization happened from west to east, with the Polynesians originating off the shores of Indonesia and slowly and steadily making their way to the easternmost islands.

But I still didn't understand why they voyaged against the dominant current.

This didn't make much sense to me.

But years later, when I was researching the episodes on Rapanui, Easter Island, I learned an important fact.

Ancient Polynesian voyagers went against the Humboldt Current because it gave them an easy ride home.

In In Polynesian society, there were navigators and voyagers whose job it was to find new islands to colonize.

These voyagers would often move against the current on their missions of exploration because, after a few weeks or whenever their supplies ran low, they could turn around and come home easily.

Part of the reason they could voyage as far as they did was because they knew they had an easy journey home.

The Humboldt Current would act as a conveyor belt taking their ships straight back to their home island.

This is brilliant.

Now, I did not understand this when I was making episode number 14.

Turns out, Thor Heyerdahl did not understand this when he was embarking on his Contiki mission.

I wish I could have put that detail into this episode, but that's what these throwbacks are for.

Now I can give you that very important piece of information.

Anyway, I am delighted to let you know that we are going to be returning to the Polynesian Islands, this time, Hawaii, for our next episode of Our Fake History.

So you can look forward to that.

In the meantime, please enjoy episode 14: Did Gods Colonize the Pacific?

There was once an adventurous young Norwegian couple who were living on the Pacific island known as Fatuhiva.

They had wrangled some funding from a Norwegian university ostensibly to do zoological research on the island.

But instead, the couple spent most of their time building huts, enjoying the beauty of the island, visiting obscure archaeological sites, and generally playing out the Norwegian academic version of Gilligan's Island.

They were the professor and Mary Ann of Fatuhiva.

While living on the island, the couple became acquainted with an old man whose name was Te Tahua.

He was the only man who lived on the east east side of the island, and apparently was the last of the islanders who had ever tasted human flesh.

Te Tahua was the last cannibal of Fatuhiva.

He befriended the Norwegians who were eager to hear his stories.

He told them about how he had already dug his own grave and carved his own coffin, so when the hour of his death approached, he could simply step inside and close the door.

He told them how human flesh tastes when it's prepared correctly.

When it's roasted and wrapped in banana leaves, it can be as sweet as a sweet potato.

It was nearly the only meat his father ever ate, except he didn't like it fresh.

He preferred human meat that had been dead on the bone for a few days.

Apparently, it's much more tender that way.

But most importantly, he told the Norwegians the story of his people's origin.

Tetahua told them that Tiki, a god-made flesh, had led his ancestors across the ocean.

From where?

queried the Norwegians.

From Tefiti, the east, responded the old man, which amazed the couple.

The only thing east of the Marquesas Islands was South America.

Could the Polynesians really have come from the east?

You see, those two Norwegians were none other than the famous adventurer and controversial theorist Thor Hirdahl and his first wife wife live.

Te Tahua's story would become an obsession of Hirdahl's, who would make it his life's work to prove the academic community wrong when it came to the question of the colonization of the Pacific.

You see, the orthodox opinion had always been that the ancient Polynesians had originated from Asia and moved their way steadily east.

But for generations, the question of exactly how people first got to such far-flung places as New Zealand, Hawaii, and Easter Island had been one of the most hotly debated topics in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and world history in general.

The voyages over thousands of miles of open ocean, which were undertaken by the early Polynesians, still boggle the mind, and to early Europeans, they seem downright impossible.

In the attempt to explain this truly incredible feat, some pretty wild theories have been hatched.

Many of these theories rely pretty heavily on mythology.

And where there are mythological theories, there's fake history.

So we have to ask: how did these remote islands ever become populated with human beings?

Which myths of the Pacific should we take seriously?

And finally, what should we make of a Norwegian willing to risk his life on a raft to prove his wild theory?

All this and more on today's Our Fake History.

One, two, three, four

Episode 14.

Did Gods Colonize the Pacific?

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name's Sebastian Major and this is the show where we look at historical myths and try and figure out what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

This week we are looking at one of the greatest feats of human migration ever undertaken.

The colonization of the Pacific.

Now I want you to take a minute and imagine the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on planet Earth.

At 1.55 million square kilometers, the ocean has a total area larger than all of the world's continents combined.

It is the most vast thing on the planet.

And yet, for some reason, people from surprisingly early historical eras chose to strike out into it.

It is incredible to think that people managed to reach the tiny islands of Polynesia hundreds and in some cases thousands of years before the invention of the sailing crafts that would take Europeans across the oceans.

Even more amazing is that the people living on those islands managed to thrive and create a civilization that still manages to boggle the mind.

The very fact that Easter Island, perhaps the most isolated island on planet Earth, is home to one of the most incredible collections of megalithic structures ever created, is a testament to the awesomeness of Polynesian civilization.

But it's the very magnificence of these cultural and navigational feats that's proved to be the driving force behind the wild speculations about the origins of the Polynesians.

When Europeans first arrived in the Pacific, to their eyes, the natives appeared primitive and uncivilized.

The polytheistic religion and cultural customs of the Polynesians, including their decided lack of clothes, their free sexual attitudes, and cannibalism on some islands, was perceived by the Christian Europeans as evidence of backwardness.

As European exploration gave way to colonization, it became widely accepted that the original inhabitants of places like Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii, or the Marquesas Islands were little more than savages, or as one missionary to Samoa put it, quote, children of nature.

To the European colonizers, it seemed impossible that the Polynesians could have possessed the sophisticated navigational techniques needed to reach the very islands they inhabited.

As a result, their existence became a puzzle.

Their cultural and artistic achievements, like the great sculptures on Easter Island, were not looked on as evidence of Polynesian sophistication.

Instead, they just became mysterious and unexplained relics.

In this way, Europeans invented one of the great mysteries of human migration.

Where did the Polynesians come from?

And how did they ever get to these isolated islands, especially places as inaccessible as New Zealand?

This question enthralled early anthropologists and human geographers, but by the early 20th century, a consensus was beginning to form among academics about the origins of Polynesians.

Their ancient ancestors had come from Asia and had slowly moved from west to east, hopping from island to island.

But before large-scale archaeological research in the islands in the 1950s, this theory had largely been supported by ethnographic, anthropological, and linguistic evidence.

Put simply, the people of Polynesia spoke a language with a number of similarities to Asian languages and had a culture that bore similarities to Asian cultures.

Therefore, they must have come from Asia.

The conclusion was logical, but the evidence was still somewhat lacking.

This left the door wide open for one of the most audacious, controversial, and famous researchers to make his entrance on the world stage.

This was none other than Thor Heyerdahl, the man who would essentially become a rock star of speculative anthropology and experimental archaeology.

In 1947, Heyerdahl was an aspiring young academic who, despite having never completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oslo, was convinced that he had cracked the code of Polynesian migration.

As mentioned in the introduction, Thor and his wife Liv spent some time in the 1930s romantically trying to, quote, return to nature on the island of Fatahiva in the Marquesas Archipelago.

While living in a hut and doing their best to mimic the lifestyle of the native islanders, Thor and Liv also found time to investigate some of the archaeological hotspots on Fatahiva and the nearby islands.

Specifically, Thor became obsessed with the colossal stone carvings that dotted the islands.

In the book Fatuhiva, his autobiographical account of his time on the island, Thor very vividly describes his first encounter with these massive sculptures, writing,

They stared at us from the thickets, with round eyes as big as life belts, and grotesque mouths drawn in diabolical grins, wide enough to swallow an entire human body.

The giants of the cliff that girt the Puamahu valley displayed such a contrast to the lazy Polynesians down on the beach that the question inevitably came to mind: Who put these red stone colossi here?

And how?

They must have weighed tons.

End quote.

In that little quote, all of Heyerdahl's prejudices are laid bare.

Indeed, the construction of these amazing sculptures must have been an incredible undertaking, and Heyerdahl couldn't believe that the Polynesians or their ancestors could have managed the feat.

He also pretty derisively calls them lazy.

But, nevertheless, this encounter would shape the rest of his life.

He writes of the moment: quote, It set me asail on rafts, led me into continental jungles, and made me excavate Easter Island monuments as high as buildings of several stories, all in an effort to solve a mystery which puzzled me from the day I began to suspect that an enterprising people with a habit of creating stone colossi had reached the eastern headland of Hivaoa before the Polynesian fishermen had arrived.

End quote.

This was the kernel of Hayerdahl's theory.

He believed that there must have been an advanced civilization that predated the ancestors of the current Polynesians.

He believed that this earlier people were more culturally sophisticated than the later occupants of the islands.

According to Hayerdahl, it was this mysterious pre-Polynesian culture that had built the impressive sculptures on Easter Island and then proceeded to spread their culture throughout the Pacific.

On top of that, Heyerdahl flew in the face of academic orthodoxy by insisting that these people had come from South America and had migrated east to west and not west to east.

Now, Heyerdahl's theory had a bit more to it than just his belief that the Polynesians couldn't possibly have built cool stone statues.

There was some botanical evidence, specifically the existence of the sweet potato as an essential staple in the diet of the Polynesian people.

This is notable because the sweet potato is a South American plant.

Indeed, more recent studies on potato genetics, and yes, potato genetics is a thing, have proved conclusively that the sweet potato originated in South America.

The fact that it exists at all in the Pacific means that there had to have been some contact between the continent and the people of the islands.

Secondly, Hairdahl pointed out that the main ocean current in the Polynesian islands is the so-called Humboldt current, which flows east to west.

It seemed impossible that people with primitive boats could have settled the Polynesian islands tacking against the dominant current.

It would have been like walking the wrong way on a conveyor belt.

So, Hayerdahl's theory had some basis in observable scientific phenomenon.

And indeed, the contemporary theory of Polynesian migration had no answer to the question of the ocean currents or the existence of the sweet potato.

They had a full-on potato paradox going on.

But Heyerdahl's theory also relied heavily on his interpretation of mythology.

He believed that in the oral traditions of both the Peruvians and the Polynesians, there were clues about this earlier migration to the Pacific, a migration led by the gods.

The story at the heart of Hayerdal's theory was that of Kontiki Viracocha, the legendary god-king from Incan mythology.

For Hayerdal, the South Americans Kontiki bore a striking resemblance to Tiki, the word for god in most Polynesian languages.

Could the myth of Viracocha actually hold the key to understanding Polynesian migration?

Now, like any myth, the Viracocha story has a number of different versions.

But for our purposes, I think we should explore the version of the story that so influenced Hayerdahl.

So, without any further ado, I give you the myth of Kontiki Viracocha.

In the Andes, it's said that Viracocha was the first of all the gods.

He created the earth and all the people of the world.

In his first attempt to create life, he brought forth an incredible race of giants that roamed the banks of Lake Titicaca.

But the giants very quickly became unruly and rebellious.

So Viracocha cursed them and turned them into stone, and then flooded the world to cleanse the evil of the giants.

To this day, on the banks of Lake Titicaca, the massive stone giants still watch over the lake as a reminder of Viracocha's great power.

Viracocha then created a community of people in his own image.

They were a group of peaceful builders who set to work creating incredible structures along the shores of Lake Titicaca.

From there, Viracocha brought forth all the other people of the earth.

He placed the first men and women in the naval of the world, a place the Incas call Cusco.

Viracocha then set out on a mighty journey to educate the people of the world.

In his travels he was given many names.

By some he was called Kantiki, which meant the beginning, because he was the source of all knowledge.

He gave the people the gifts of civilization, agriculture, architecture, and mathematics.

Viracocha then went to live with his people back on the shores of the lake.

But soon the people of the world became jealous of Viracocha.

The society of the gods was magnificent to the people of Kokimbo Valley, and they wished to plunder its great wealth.

And so, one day, a chieftain from the valley, named Kari, led a band of warriors to the home home of Viracocha and slaughtered many of the gods' people.

But Viracocha was peaceful and refused to take revenge even though it was his sacred rite.

Instead, he collected the people he could and led an exodus to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Then, some say that Viracocha and his people simply walked across the water, over the waves and beyond the horizon, heading steadily over the Pacific.

Those who stayed behind took what they could from Viracocha's civilization and founded the Incan Empire, which had come to dominate the Andes until the coming of the Spanish.

Legend has it that Contiqui Viracocha found a new home over the ocean, but he always watched his children in the east, his murderous, murderous children.

The End

This version of the Kantiki myth is the one that Hyerdahl himself managed to cobble together.

You see, there are dozens of divergent narratives about Viracocha, and interestingly enough, most of them do not include the story about the war between Viracocha's people and the people of Coquimbo Valley.

That particular detail detail only seems to turn up in the oral traditions collected by Hyerdal.

Hyrdahl also became fixated on the physical description of Viracocha.

He's often described as having a long beard, and even more tantalizing, in some traditions, he has light skin.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have another white god.

The evidence for this comes from the 16th century Spanish accounts who claim that the Incas called the conquistadors Viracochas because of their beards and light skin.

The Spanish conquistador and historian Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, one of the first Europeans to record Incan history in his book, The History of the Incas, said that the Incas described Viracocha as, quote, a man of medium height, white, and dressed in a white robe like an alb secured round the waist, and that he carried a staff and a book in his hands.

End quote.

Now, if this is all starting to sound a little familiar, then that means this is not your first episode of Our Fake History.

This tradition of a white bearded god coming to the people of the Americas, bringing them the secrets of civilization, and then taking off across the ocean, we've heard it before.

The last time this story popped up, we were talking about the Aztecs, or Mexica, and their god Quetzalquatl.

The story of Viracocha is remarkably similar to that of Quetzalcoatl.

So what's going on here?

Well it seems like the tradition of the creator god slash culture hero who gave people the basics of civilization exists all over the Americas.

Actually, it exists all over the world.

As I've pointed out before, this is just one of those mythological tropes that keeps popping up.

The Greeks had Prometheus, the Indians had Krishna, the Mesoamericans had Quetzalquattle, and the Incas had Viracocha.

It's not out of the question for a similar tradition about a creator god giving the gift of agriculture to his people before disappearing to spread organically throughout the Americas, or also for it to pop up independently.

You might have also noticed that the Viracocha story also contains another cross-cultural mythological trope, the flood that destroys an earlier, more evil version of humanity.

But the detail that Viracocha and Quetzalquatl were light-skinned is undoubtedly a much later addition to the story.

As we discovered in our exploration of Quetzalquatl, his story was changed in the accounts that were created after the contact with Europeans.

Neither Quetzalquattl nor Viracocha were described as having light-skinned by any sources that predate European contact.

This is especially true in the case of Kontiki Viracocha, who only ever appears to be described as white by European sources like Gamboa.

The stories of white gods are the result of later mythical mashups that were either written by Europeans or written for European audiences.

Nevertheless, at the time that Heyerdahl was formulating his theory on the origins of the Polynesians, the white gods myth was still taken more or less at face value.

Heyerdahl would then double down on this theory by suggesting that the Contiqui-Viracocha myth could actually be a clue that there had been a light-skinned pre-In civilization that were more culturally advanced than all of their neighbors.

Remember those stone giants from the story?

Well, they still exist in Peru today.

On the banks of Lake Titicaca are massive sculptures of human beings.

Hyerdal believed these structures were constructed by this pre-Incan people.

He also believed that the same people that built those statues also built the big stone statues we see on Rapanui, or Easter Island.

And all those colossi that he was seeing at Fatuhiva.

Yeah, that had to be the same people.

He also believed that in the myth of Viracocha, there was a clue about why these people originally had to take to the seas.

You see, in there there's this confrontation with the darker skinned people who would later become the Incas.

Heyerdahl speculated that after some kind of violent conflict, this Viracochin civilization of stoneworkers and architects boarded balsa wood rafts, like those first described by the Spanish when they came to the coast of Peru, and set sail along the Humboldt Current to the Polynesian Islands.

There they arrived in Rapanui and they built their impressive megastructures, and from that base they proceeded to colonize all of the islands in the Pacific.

It was a pretty far-out theory, even for the 1940s when Polynesian civilization was still considered a bit of a mystery by most of Western academia.

After fighting in occupied Norway against the Nazis in World War II, Thor and his wife moved to New York.

He tried desperately to find a publisher publisher for his work on Polynesian migration and was essentially laughed out of every office he went into.

It was a dark time.

His marriage fell apart.

He was basically living hand-to-mouth, getting many of his meals at a home for Norwegian sailors.

The world of academia scoffed at Heyerdell as a kook whose theory was half-baked and flew in the face of conventional knowledge.

From then on in, Thor saw himself as a maverick who didn't need the validation of the mainstream academic community.

He devised a plan.

What do you do when no one will take your audacious theory seriously?

Simple.

Pull a wild, death-defying stunt and make yourself the most famous Polynesian researcher in the world.

That's just how Thor rolls.

Enter the Contiki Expedition.

Thor Heyerdahl was convinced that all he needed to do for people to take his theory seriously was prove that a journey from Peru to the Polynesian islands was possible, and furthermore, that that journey could have been undertaken using the technology that was available to indigenous South Americans.

So he recruited a team of old friends and other curious adventurers.

In the end, four other Norwegians and one Swede would follow him to Peru, where they were going to build a raft.

The plan was pretty straightforward.

First, they needed to build a vessel using only the materials that would have been available to the ancient Peruvian people.

The The next step was take that boat, put it to sea, and pray like hell you made it to Polynesia.

First, they would need to head into the jungles to select and cut down a number of balsa wood trees.

This was an emulation of the balsa wood rafts described by the early Spanish conquistadors when they first came to the shores of Peru.

The Incas had used large flat-bottom rafts to fish and transport goods along the coasts.

In fact, one of the captains of conquistador Francisco Pizarro's ships described coming across one of these crafts off the coast of what is now Ecuador.

These reports described large boats, usually made of five to eleven balsa wood logs strapped together.

They had tall masts and large cotton sails rivaling the Spanish ships in size.

In the center of the raft was a thatched roof cabin, and at the rear was a cooking station.

They were navigated by placing a series of centerboards between the cracks in the logs, which allowed the craft to tack upwind if needed.

Apparently, the largest of these boats could hold fifty men and three horses.

Working from these descriptions, Heyerdahl and his crew sought to recreate the craft exactly as it was described.

They only used hemp ropes as fasteners and refused to use any iron nails or other modern provisions.

After a few months of work, the raft they christened the Contiki was ready for its voyage.

It was a sturdy vessel made of nine balsa wood logs, a 29-foot mast made of mangrove wood, a modest thatched-roof cabin, and a single cotton sail.

The mission was simple.

Sail that raft nearly 8,000 kilometers along the Humboldt Current to Polynesia and prove that such a journey could have been possible.

The only modern accessories they would carry were 56 sealed cans of water, some army food rations in case of emergencies, a hand-cranked radio to communicate with the outside world, and notably, a movie camera.

If nothing else, Heyerdahl was a master of publicity, so you better believe this stunt was going to be documented, and in color, no less.

The craft set off on its journey on April 28, 1947, after Thor and his crew signed a waiver saying the Peruvian Navy was not responsible if all of them died at sea.

The raft was then towed 80 kilometers offshore by the Peruvians, a fact that is rarely ignored by Heyerdall's critics.

But once it was out there, it began sailing along the Humboldt Current.

Amazingly, the raft proved incredibly seaworthy and fared surprisingly well in the open ocean.

The space between the balsa wood logs meant that water would simply wash out of the boat, so it was literally impossible to swamp it.

They also discovered that food was less of a problem than they originally anticipated.

As they sailed, fish would naturally gravitate to the bottom of the boat.

They could be caught by hand just by reaching between the logs.

The crew actually made a game out of catching sharks by the tail.

Apparently, you would hang some fish guts over the edge of the boat and wait for a shark to come and gobble them up.

After the shark grabbed his treat, he would turn tail and quickly make a dive.

The trick was to grab the shark by the tail at the exact moment and haul him on the deck.

Apparently, the men on board got pretty good at this.

Of course, the journey was not all fun and shark catching games.

Halfway, the crew very nearly lost their lives in a violent storm.

But amazingly, the little raft never capsized.

Perhaps the most dangerous moment of the whole trip occurred when they finally hit land after 97 days at sea.

On that day, the crew spotted a small atoll.

It was Polynesia, but they deemed it was too isolated to stop and would have been dangerous for them to take their boat in, so they decided to keep sailing.

Three days later, the Kontiki expedition came to a dramatic end when the Kontiki smashed against a reef off yet another dangerous atoll, which was part of French Polynesia.

A massive rogue wave crept up on the raft and hammered the crew.

Thor described the event in his eventual book on the Kontiki mission, writing, quote, Then I saw the next sea towering up higher than all the rest, and again I bellowed a warning to the others as I climbed up to stay as high as I could get in a hurry and hung on fast.

Then the great wave reached them, and we all had one single thought, hold on, hold on, hold, hold, hold.

We must have hit the reef at that time.

The Kontiki was wholly changed as if by a magic wand.

The vessel we knew from weeks and months at sea was no more.

In a few seconds, our pleasant world was a shattered wreck.

End quote.

But in an amazing turn of good luck, every single member of the Kon Tiki crew survived the wreck.

They even managed to salvage most of their supplies and their boat and reconvened on a nearby beach, where eventually they were greeted by a group of friendly islanders.

It's almost too crazy.

Most importantly, they had their radio, so they were able to call for help and were eventually picked up by a French schooner.

They'd done it.

Despite its violent end, the Contiki expedition had been successful.

They had proved that it was entirely possible for South Americans to have sailed to Polynesia.

They defied all expectations and came out on the other end alive and famous.

In the celebrations, one crew member, Bent Danielson, would quip, Purgatory was a little damp, but heaven was more or less how I imagined it.

The Kontiki expedition would go down as one of the most famous acts of experimental archaeology ever undertaken.

In fact, it might have been one of the greatest feats ever accomplished in the service of fake history.

Thanks to the daily radio transmissions being sent by the crew to the wider world, the global media soon started to follow the story pretty closely.

When the Contiki set sail, a small article about the mission appeared in the back pages of the New York Times.

By the time they made landfall, they were literally front-page news.

The film that the crew members made of their voyage became an international sensation, and in 1951, it actually won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Heyerdahl's stock was higher than ever.

But despite that, his ideas never really caught on.

The Kontiki expedition proved that a voyage from South America to Polynesia could have happened, but not that it did happen.

And as much as I love the audacity of Thor Heyerdahl, there is now a mountain of evidence demonstrating how wrong he was about Polynesian migration.

The Polynesian islands were undeniably settled from west to east.

The evidence for it's pretty overwhelming.

Let's take you through it.

First of all, there's the archaeological evidence.

In 1952, an American archaeological team excavating the island of New Caledonia on the western edge of Polynesia discovered a type of pottery called Lapita.

This pottery seems to have been first developed in the islands of Melanesia, just east of New Guinea, around 1350 BCE.

This pottery appears as far east as Samoa and Tonga, with the earliest pottery shards there dating to about 800 BCE.

Now, I know pottery shards are not nearly as exciting as death-defying raft missions, but their meaning is incredibly important.

It means that the people who used this type of pottery, the ancestors of the Polynesians, originated in the West, near Asia, and steadily spread their culture east.

Archaeology also shows us that human settlements become younger as you move east across the Pacific.

Thanks to carbon dating, we know that the human settlements in places like Fiji in the west are demonstrably older than the earliest human settlements on Easter Island, the furthest east Pacific Island.

The youngest human settlements are actually found on New Zealand, which makes sense given how far away it is from the central Polynesian archipelago.

New Zealand is actually the last major landmass on Earth to be colonized by humans.

The ancestors of the Maori people, the indigenous people of New Zealand, don't seem to have arrived there until the late 1200s AD.

Huh, the late 1200s.

Something was happening in Europe in those years.

But what was it?

Oh, yeah.

Okay, okay.

I promise that's the last time I'm going to use that clip.

But it's pretty incredible to think that while Europe was still deep in its medieval period, the ancestors of the Maori were undertaking incredible oceanic voyages.

In recent years, genetic testing has more or less settled the question of who settled the Pacific.

By tracing the appearance of of certain genes in the remains of ancient Polynesians, it becomes more and more clear that they originated in Asia.

For instance, in the early 2000s, the bones of pre-contact Easter Islanders were tested by geneticist Erika Hedelberg.

She was looking for genetic markers that would give clues about whether or not they were Polynesian in origin or potentially had some contact with South America.

Well, as she did her research, she came across something called the Polynesian motif, a group of genes only seen in people from Polynesia.

This pretty conclusively tells us that the original inhabitants of Easter Islands were genetically related to people from the West, and not South Americans.

So how did the Polynesians do it?

How did they manage to colonize the most massive body of water on planet Earth?

Well, the answer is more simple than you might think.

First, they had a tradition of navigation stretching back thousands of years.

They prized navigational knowledge as the most important wisdom a person could have.

And, secondly, they had some seriously kick-ass boats.

It's pretty incredible how quickly Europeans forgot, or simply ignored, the navigational skills of the Polynesians, especially considering most early European voyages into the Pacific were aided by Polynesian navigators.

In 1769, the British explorer Captain Cook enlisted the help of a man named Tupia, who was a priest and navigator from what are today known as the Society Islands.

Tupia was able to guide Cook's boat, the Endeavor, throughout the Polynesian islands and eventually took him all the way to New Zealand, where he was honored by the local Maori as a Tohunga or a great priest.

He was apparently able to draw a map with a 2,000-mile radius showing the exact location of 130 islands, 74 of which he knew by name.

Tupia's very existence proves that at the time of contact, the Polynesians were very sophisticated navigators and were regularly undertaking massive oceanic voyages.

The boats that they used for these journeys are often referred to as voyaging canoes, or as New Zealand's Maori call them, wakas.

The wakas were sturdy double-hulled boats, kind of like modern catamarans.

They could either be paddled or sailed using up to three cotton sails.

They could carry dozens of people, were able to tack upwind, and were able to surf waves to avoid capsizing.

The wakas were infinitely superior boats to the balsa wood crafts recreated by Heyerdahl.

They could make greater headway upwind, and they were considerably faster.

Modern recreations of the Wakas can move at up to fourteen knots, which is almost twice as fast as the fastest balsa wood raft.

The Polynesians also had very sophisticated navigation techniques.

Modern research has shown that the Polynesians were adept at navigating using the stars, and even developed a rudimentary navigational tool out of a cocoa nut that's been called a star peeper.

It's essentially a cocoa nut that's been cut in half and has holes drilled through it that can be used to identify the locations of key stars.

Many also believed that the Polynesians would follow migratory bird paths in order to plot their roots.

They knew that the birds would eventually rest at an island.

So, therefore, that was the safest route.

These techniques existed in Polynesia for hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans, and only seemed to fade out of the culture after colonization really got going in the late 1700s.

But in the late 1960s, there was a conscious revival of tradition Polynesian culture, especially in Hawaii.

This was dubbed the Hawaiian Renaissance, and it came with a renewed interest in traditional forms of art, music, and most importantly for us, navigational knowledge.

In 1973, the Polynesian Navigation Society was formed, with the goal of proving that ancient Polynesian vessels and navigation techniques could have been used to colonize the Pacific.

Taking a page from Thor Hayerdell's book, the members of the society built a boat in accordance with traditional methods.

The result was the double-hulled voyaging canoe, dubbed the Hokulea, the first voyaging canoe to be built in Hawaii in over six hundred years.

In nineteen seventy six, the craft set out on her maiden journey, captained by the Hawaiian Kauika Kapahulehua, and navigated by the Micronesian master of traditional navigation, Mau Pielog.

The Hukalea successfully made the journey from Hawaii to Tahiti without the use of any modern navigational equipment.

And on top of that, they didn't even get towed offshore.

Eat it, Thor.

The Hokalea and other journeys by the Polynesian Navigation Society not only proved that Polynesians could have have colonized the Pacific using those boats, but they also proved that they were incredibly seaworthy, and it actually makes a lot more sense than any other crazy theory that's out there.

So, was it a group of ancient monument-loving white people who first colonized the Pacific?

No.

Thor Heyerdahl's theories, although borne out by a pretty sweet stunt, are simply not supported by the vast body of archaeological, anthropological, and genetic evidence.

Many have also pointed out that a mythical race of ancient white people bringing civilization to the world is problematic for a whole lot of other reasons.

I don't need to tell you, it's got some pretty racist implications.

Hayerdahl fell into the trap that so many Europeans had before him.

He sold the Polynesians short.

He was willing to entertain some pretty extravagant ideas instead of engaging with the evidence that Polynesian civilization was way more impressive than he was willing to give it credit for.

Interestingly enough, new research has shown that Heyerdahl's idea that there had to have been contact between South America and Polynesia may actually have something to it.

You see, there was contact between South America and Polynesia, but it wasn't South Americans going to the islands, it was islanders coming to South America.

Now, the evidence of this is still a little tenuous, but there are archaeological sites in Chile that suggest that Polynesians in wakas traveling along the southern current, that's close to Antarctica, made their way to that continent where they picked up that tasty little tuber we know as the sweet potato.

So what should we make of Thor Heyerdell?

Well, his theory was bananas, and modern research has shown that not only was he wrong about the Pacific, but his grandiose theory about an ancient super-race who brought civilization to the rest of the world, it just didn't happen.

However, his life and career remind us that it's important to question orthodoxy.

He also showed future researchers, including the Polynesian Voyaging Society, the value of engaging in experimental archaeology.

If someone tells you it's impossible to do something, actually try and do it.

If someone says you can't cut down a tree with a stone axe, go out and cut down a tree with a stone axe.

If someone says it was impossible to move a massive stone statue by hand, go out there and move a statue by hand.

If someone tells you you can't cross the ocean in a balsa wood raft, you get on that raft, son.

Who knows?

You might just get famous.

Okay, that's all for this week.

Thanks again for listening.

Before we go today, I just wanted to mention that Our Fake History is now part of a very new, exciting podcaster collective known as the Dark Myths Collective.

It's a group of like-minded, well-produced podcasts who are all into things like history, myths, legends, and wild stories.

You know, my kind of stuff.

There's a number of fantastic podcasts involved in this group, including Danielle Bolelli's History on Fire.

If you haven't checked that out, you really should.

Jordan Harbor's Twilight Histories, and also Astonishing Legends.

So a number of great podcasts.

Should go over to darkmyths.org and check out the whole roster and listen to all those podcasts.

As always, if you want to get in touch with me, you can send me an email at rfakehistory at gmail.com.

Or you can follow along on Twitter at our fakehistory.

Or you can go to the Facebook group at Facebook slash R Fake History and follow along there.

I'm always dropping hints.

I love talking to you guys, so please come along with us.

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I'm moved by it.

I love it.

And all of you guys that have been reaching out to me, some of you sent me some really, really sweet notes this past week.

And honestly, I really love getting to know you guys.

I love knowing that people out there are into this show.

You all seem like very interesting, weird people, and I'm glad we've found each other in this weird internet world.

So keep reaching out.

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I love hearing from you.

And

onwards and upwards, man.

We've got some cool stuff coming up on the show.

I'll give you a hint.

The next show, it's going to be a trilogy.

Okay, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

You can check out Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

And all the other music you hear on the show is written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major.

And remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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